Fbloggs Geekdom

I just moved my WordPress blog from WordPress.com to a privately hosted site. I use Islandnet, an ISP on Vancouver Island, BC, where I live.
( PLUG: I’ve used them for Internet services since 1994, and they are highly reliable and technically very competent. They are also very responsive.)

You might find other blog posts on this subject, so I’ve written this as a point-form cookbook. Also, it specifically applies to moving to Islandnet’s servers, so some details may be different, depending on your ISP. However, I suspect most of the issues will be the same. It’s actually a pretty simple process:

1. Login in to your wordpress.com blog, go to Admin pages, and Export your blog. Take the option to include all images, etc. Save the export on your PC.
2. Decide on a directory on your ISP that you want to install WordPress in. I chose to copy it to the root directory (/www/ ). I also run a test version of drupal, and that’s in a subdirectory. Give the directory read/write permissions for all users – WordPress needs this to install properly. On Islandnet, you go to the File manager web page and change the permissions for the directory.
3. Log in to the SQL manager web page on your ISP (at Islandnet this is under host manager, databases) and create a MySQL database named wpdb (or whatever).
4. Follow steps 1 through 5 of the Famous 5 Minute Install. Notes on this process:
   • Download from wordpress.org – I got version 2.8.1, as of this writing.
   • I mentioned the SQL database creation step above – it’s also mentioned in the Famous 5 Minute Install docs.
5. Login to the new WordPress site. Because I have it in the root directory, I just go to www.fbloggs.com to get to my site.
   Go to Admin, and Import the exported blog. This will bring in all your old content, including images, etc. Works like magic. Note that it retains the original post dates, also.
6. Go to the dropdown box for Settings, and select Permalinks. Change it to pretty links – I include the article date and name as the link. This is the third radio button down, called ‘Month and name’. You might also want to read the WordPress official guidelines on Permalinks, to make sure you don’t create performance issues based on the setting you choose.
7. I got a message saying it couldn’t update my .htaccess file. At this point, I created one in Notepad, copied in the statements generated by WordPress, and FTp’d it to the /www/ directory. This is required in order to make pretty permalinks work.
8. Go to your old wordpress.com blog and update those posts with a link to each equivalent post in your new blog, using the format for permalinks you selected in the previous step. Obviously, if you have tons of content, this is a real drag. There’s not really a better alternative, though.

So far, I’ve chosen to leave all the existing content in posts I want to keep on my old site, but I may decide to delete it all except the links in the future.

From here, I’m going to experiment with different themes, widgets, plugins, etc. The one I missed immediately was the stats one that shows up in the Admin page in wordpress.com. You can install this from here. Hopefully traffic will start moving over to my new site.

I moved my blog today. Now I’m looking for a new theme, because ‘Silver is the new black’ is only available at WordPress.com, and I can’t find it anywhere. Also, I’ve deleted all non-popular posts from my old blog site (fbloggs.wordpress.com).  There does not seem to be an easy way to redirect visitors on a WordPress.com-hosted blog to a new host, so I’ve added links to this site for all the important articles.